Progressing in Faith vs. Progressive Faith

Of course, I quickly learned there were many incredible Bible expositors throughout history far more versed than I was whom I could access and study. Having them come from a wide variety of backgrounds blessed me immeasurably as I have walked forward in my faith, increasing my understanding of God’s Word and will.

Building Spiritual Muscle

In his letter to the Corinthian church, the Apostle Paul addressed believers’ need to grow in their faith, comparing spiritual growth to a child growing and transitioning from simple to more complex and harder to digest foods. He then warned believers not to follow the specific instructions of individual Christians over the teachings of Christ. All believers need to start with a solid foundation and build off that unmovable platform, Jesus the Rock.

But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human?

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.

According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 3:1–10)

Paul’s teachings often expound on teachings in the Old Testament. This teaching on spiritual growth expounds on Isaiah 28:9–10, where the prophet explains who will receive deeper understanding of the Lord’s message and how:

To whom will he teach knowledge, and to whom will he explain the message? Those who are weaned from the milk, those taken from the breast? For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little. (ESV)

Building Higher upon a Firm Foundation

These concepts are easily grasped, as any home builder understands that one cannot build a solid structure on an unstable or weak foundation. And as Answers in Genesis has demonstrated repeatedly, the seedbed of all Christian doctrines are founded, directly or indirectly, in the book of Genesis, particularly chapters 1–11.

Builders also understand that as they go higher, the stability of each successive floor they build depends on the one underneath it. As Isaiah explains, the same applies to building your faith, precept upon precept, here a little, there a little.

Contradictions Not Allowed

It is also vital to understand that as you gain an over-arching theological understanding, you cannot hold contradictory views simultaneously. True contradictions are inherently false because they make incongruous claims. And when people knowingly make false statements, they are lying. However, scripture reminds us that

God is not man, that he should lie. (Numbers 23:19)

We can trust that God would not actually make contradictory statements because He knows all things; therefore, He cannot be mistaken and cannot lie.

Truth is a central tenet of Christian apologetics. If believers accept contradictions within the Christian worldview, then to be fair and logically consistent, they would also have to extend that acceptance to any other worldview. (This is the main reason that AiG produces books and articles debunking “apparent contradictions” in Scripture and produces materials showing that there is no contradiction between observational science and God’s Word).

Building Biblical Understanding

The fact is, the Bible is a large volume containing the deepest, most vital topics any human could consider. One could expect that an individual’s views may grow and change over time as they notice how Scripture interprets and clarifies itself. But study takes time, and unfortunately, according to numerous studies, most Christians do not do it.

Remember, progressing in your faith is like a toddler learning to walk. Toddlers fall and struggle to gain strength in their young legs. So believers may stumble over a conflicting verse that requires more study to confront actual truth.

Contradictions: A Self-Correcting Mechanism

Contradictions are extremely useful, as they are an intellectual warning sign, a self-correcting mechanism born from the laws of logic God gave us to help navigate all of life. Without the red flag of contradiction, we may not know there was anything wrong that needed to be corrected.

A Christian who is growing in knowledge and understanding of God’s Word will often change views throughout life. Progressing in the Christian faith is a very good thing, just as children grow in understanding as they mature.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. (1 Corinthians 13:11)

However, Scripture also gives some very serious warnings about the pitfalls of listening to supposed workers of God who teach false doctrine.

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. (Matthew 7:15)

False Teachers

Because false teachers are deceptive, many use familiar terms and Scripture verses to back up their claims. As the great Prince of Preachers Charles Spurgeon once said,

Discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong. It is knowing the difference between right and almost right.

We’ve Seen Them Come, and We’ve Seen Them Go

Ever since the Christian church was first established, many gnostic cults and religious movements have piggy-backed off it, attempting to co-opt its teachings and credibility in various ways throughout history, continuing to this day.

Many a discerning believer will remember the very recent and popular emergent-church movement a few years back (spearheaded by Brian McLaren) and its supposed evangelical darling Rob Bell, who’s collection of Nooma videos littered far too many a youth Pastor’s bookshelves for far too long.

Several Bible-defending Christians and ministries (including Answers in Genesis) warned believers to watch out for the insidious nature of this movement’s treacherous teachings, only to be rebuffed by many naïve folks who defended them as brothers who were simply revealing God and the truths of the Bible in new and innovative ways.

Of course, we don’t see evangelicals defending the emergent church much anymore, as despite their profession as true believers in God and his Word, their foundations and actual beliefs were finally revealed through their many books and lectures.

Today, Rob Bell is just another peddler of religion in general, a star pupil of Oprah Winfrey (a confessed non-Christian) whom Bell describes as having “taught me more about what Jesus has for all of us, and what kind of life Jesus wants us to live, more than almost anybody in my life.”

This isn’t surprising when looking at where he believes God’s Word and ways came from:

All of these things that people think dropped out of the sky by divine edict are actually a reflection of ongoing human evolution and a thousand other factors that have shaped why we as humans have done what we’ve done.1

Of course, Brian McLaren said much the same, earlier:

If we believe that the same God who created an evolving universe is revealed in an evolving Bible. . . . We might say that the Bible similarly retains a record of its own evolution, and in our individual spiritual development we may personally recapitulate earlier stages.2

Should we really be surprised that these men, who didn’t believe the first part of the Bible from which all Christian doctrines are founded, eventually abandoned the rest of Scripture as plainly written? They had the wrong foundation from which to build upon.

Progressive Christianity?

Today we see a repackaging of the same old theological song and dance that the emergent church tried to pull off just over a decade ago, and once again many professing Christians are jumping on board this train called Progressive Christianity, having their ears tickled by charlatans that are laying deceptive traps concerning the reliability of God’s Word.

Here’s just one, blatant example: GracePointe Church in Nashville, Tennessee, is a self-professed “progressive Christian church” whose literature encapsulates what they believe Scripture is and isn’t. It reads,

The word of God isn’t the word of God, self-interpreting, a science book, an answer/rule book, inerrant or infallible.

Let that sink in. A so-called Christian church is declaring (say it with me) that the Bible isn’t the Word of God.

Well, what about 1 Thessalonians 2:13: “And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers?”

“The Bible isn’t an answer book.”

Then why does 1 Peter 3:15 say we should have answers for our faith, while 2 Timothy 3:16–17 declares, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work”?

“The Bible isn’t a rule book.”

Really? What about the ten commandments? What about the greatest commandment: “You shall love the Lord with all your heart, strength, soul and mind . . . and you shall love your neighbor as yourself”? There are in fact many places in Scripture that tell you either to do or do not certain things (rules).

“The Bible isn’t inerrant or infallible.”

Well, if the Bible has errors that were known by God to be errors, then God must have lied, (which He can’t), or that God isn’t God!

You see, they are directly contradicting what God’s Word says, which means that it is false. This kind of teaching is certainly not the starting point on which to build your faith.

Start Them Off Young

We need to understand that these notions are promoted among the young. An example is the Progressive Christian author Matthew Paul Turner, who confesses that he often changed the wording while reading Christian children’s books because he didn’t agree with what it was teaching. He isn’t meaning to shield his child from biblical misinformation, but to change central concepts of the gospel—like sin! In a religionnews.com article,3 he says,

I was told how much I was a sinner or how terrible I was or how much I needed Jesus to die for my sins long before I realized and understood the concept that God created me, he adored me, (he) made me with purpose.

Turner goes on to say,

I just think it’s really important, as progressive people of faith, while we are in the process of finding new ways to celebrate or explore our faith, that we offer something as a foundation to the kids.

And what would that foundation be? Well, Turner reveals his underlying supposition of Genesis:

For spiritual parents who are looking for a different kind of creation book, Matthew Paul Turner’s When God Made the World focuses on the complex way that God created our vast and scientifically operating universe, including the biodiversity of life on our planet and the intricacies of a vast solar system.4

These spiritual parents (i.e., progressive Christians) often complain about typical Christian children’s books as being “skewed conservative,” which is actually just code for “too biblical.” They reflect what the Bible plainly says! That’s why they are looking for a different kind of creation book, one that conforms to the story of evolution.

And Turner is more than happy to deliver it to them. In his book When God Made the World, after describing the creation from the Big Bang (introducing ideas like the sun coming into existence before the earth and poisonous plants forming before the Fall), he drops this little snippet:

Yes, all living creatures from whales to snails,
From those covered with feathers to those covered with scales,
Each God designed with a home in mind.
To develop and evolve if needed over time.5

However, if you are going to change clear declarative details laid out in scripture to make the Bible conform to some other outside narrative, how could you possibly build a consistent Christian worldview upon that non-biblical framework?

The “Sin” of Certainty

One of the hallmarks of both the emergent church and Progressive Christianity movements is a kind of fuzzy logic approach to Scripture, which can sound right because of the non-absolutist approach they often take.6 The fact that there are elements of truth there can cause the undiscerning to think that what they are hearing is perhaps orthodoxy simply expressed in a new way. I got a good dose of this years ago when I did a book review on theistic evolutionist Peter Enns’s book The Sin of Certainty.

I won’t give you the whole review for brevity’s sake, but I want to share a few highlights which demonstrate the fuzzy logic typical of this type of teaching.

As you read his book,7 unsurprisingly, “Enns spends an inordinate amount of time quoting Scripture authoritatively and telling you what he thinks it means to convince you that you can’t take it as plainly written (authoritatively) which is self-defeating.”8 Of course, this view reveals that the only real authority that he is relying on is his own!

“In fact, Enns reveals that he believes in a god that he wants to believe in (rather than the God revealed in Scripture,”9 and he even explains why. He claims “he used to be orthodox in his thinking,”10 but then something dramatic happened: he watched the Disney movie Bridge to Terabithia on a plane ride. He said,

A fifty-two second exchange in a movie. . . . And the next thing I know, my view of God flies away as if sucked out the window due to a loss of cabin pressure.

Yes, that’s correct. Apparently, a brief bit of made-up dialog between two young fictional girls discussing the Bible changed his entire outlook on how to understand God’s Word! And the paradigm-shifting line from the fictional (non-Christian) character Leslie is this:

I seriously do not think God goes around damning people to hell. He’s too busy running all this.

Laughably, “Enns [a seminary trained Christian professor] describes that this dialogue caused him to be ‘nostril deep in a faith crisis.’”11

How was I to know that the company that gave us Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Son of Flubber would venture deep into a religious debate? I was just minding my own business at thirty thousand feet over the Midwest and was caught off guard. Me—a professional Christian, a seminary professor paid to think right thoughts about God and to tell others about them. But after a long trip, my orthodoxy shield was resting at my side. I was unarmed, and Leslie’s words hit their mark. In a flash and without words, I thought quietly to myself, I think Leslie’s right.

The idea that the Creator of heaven and Earth, with all their beauty, wonder, and mystery, was at the same time a supersized Bible thumping preacher, obsessed with whether our thoughts were all in place and ready to condemn us to eternity to hell if they weren’t, made no sense—even though that was my operating (though unexamined) assumption as long as I could remember.”

“Now the idea that a seminary trained Christian Professor’s belief in God was devastated by a fictional children's character . . .  is bad enough. But the fact that the view he had of God was that of a ‘supersized Bible thumping preacher’ should set alarm bells ringing for believers as to whether Enns has ever known who God is.” 12

He goes on to say, “Leslie’s God was the one I, deep down, wanted to believe in.”

But ultimately, he admits this was no sudden, existential crisis he had just gone through. “He admits he’s thought this way for a long time”13:

Judging by an old journal I stumbled on from my early twenties, these themes have been my home base for over thirty years.

His home base was the same as a fictional non-Christian child’s. But his real foundation was entrenched much deeper, in the story of evolution, and he recognized that it didn’t match what he saw in Scripture. Incredibly, “in his chapter on evolution Enns admits what Genesis plainly says”14 (even though he doesn’t believe it):

The problem for biblically centered Christians is that the Bible, right in the very beginning, tells us clearly that God created all life forms with a simple “Let there be . . .” No common descent, natural selection, or billions of years required. So if Darwin was right, the Bible was wrong.

But Enns says “he believes Darwin was right,” which means “he isn’t a ‘biblically centered Christian’” and that “he believes the Bible is wrong.”15 Therefore, there are only two conclusions: 1. “God knowingly put contradictions in His word”16 (which means that the God of the Bible isn’t the God he reveals himself to be) or 2. “The Bible isn’t actually inspired.”17 Either of these options naturally lead to the idea that you cannot know anything about the Bible with certainty, which Enns refers to as sin.

All this to say that a faith in a living God that is preoccupied with certainty is sin, for it compromises the gospel—personally, locally, and globally.

Of course, by his own profession, Enns can’t truly know this, even though he sounds quite certain about it. “He cannot point to a specific Scripture to back it [his claim] up, . . .  he has already stated that the words in the Bible are not ultimately trustworthy. So Enns is just relying on his own mind to determine truth. He has become the god he follows.”18

Unless he’s reformed his position, Enns’s worldview is a mess, a sham, and a contradiction to God’s revealed Word. Yet he is respected by many in the Christian community as highly educated and thought of as deeply theological. But in the end, Enns revealed that he is “certain” that certainty is “sin.” In that paradigm, there is no way to truly grow as a believer in God’s Word, as you are forever treading on ever sinking sand, mired in a world of contradiction and redefining of terms, never coming to a conclusion about anything until everything becomes meaningless.

Regressive Christianity

Progressive Christianity is actually regressive Christianity. It cannot allow true growth because it allows for contradictory ideas. Without standing on the authority of God’s Word, you cannot grow in wisdom, understanding, and discernment, as there is no precept upon which to build your faith further. I would daresay that the vast majority of self-proclaimed Progressive Christians do not believe the foundational truths laid out in Genesis as real history. And it affects every aspect of their understanding of the Bible.

Build Your House on the Rock

Remember, Scripture encourages Christians to progress in the faith, but don’t confuse that idea with someone encouraging you to accept progressive Christianity. We must start with the right foundation as Jesus instructed, lest we be swept away by the storms of life.

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” (Matthew 7:24–27)